06 May 2008

There's so much functionality with Ajax on the web, you can drag and drop and do more, the same
thing will happen on mobile devices

T-Mobile International joined Vodafone last week as two of the carriers on board with Nokia’s new brand of services called Ovi.

Although there has been a lot of buzz about Ovi, a word that means “door” in Finnish, the extent of it all is a little hard to grasp. MocoNews caught up with Nokia’s Serena Glover in Bellevue for a better sense to get an idea of where it is all going.

Glover co-founded Twango, the company Nokia acquired and made its first service branded under the Ovi name. As Nokia director of entertainment and communications, she heads up Share on Ovi, the social network platform where media can be viewed and shared with others.

In upcoming months, more services, like music, games and maps, will transition under the brand. Glover remains in the Seattle area, where Nokia is opening up a substantial office this summer to handle its media-sharing strategy. They currently have 51 employees with plans to hire up to 30 more this year, and have enough room for 125. The office will be located in a creative part of Kirkland, home also to Bungie, the game studio that developed Halo, and Google’s area offices. Some excerpts from our conversation:

-- What is Ovi?: Last August, Nokia launched Ovi, and is the umbrella of a collection of Nokia services. Glover said the brand is spending a lot of time on the phone’s user interface, taking particular effort at creating clean and easy-to-use entry points for the customer. When the consumer opens the box, they should have an easy experience. For instance, do you want to create an Ovi account? If yes, which services are you interested in: media sharing, games, maps, pictures, etc.

-- Openness: “We believe in open as well ... consumers want the ability to choose. We never want to be the center of their universe. The person is the center.” Share On Ovi is available to anyone with a phone, not just a Nokia. “We are going to make the best integration into Nokia devices, and make the experience really compelling, but we will be open to all.” Already, the photo-uploading services connect to Share, but also to Flickr and other popular services. What is less clear is what will happen with other services—if a person wants to purchase a song, would they be able to easily connect into Rhapsody or iTunes? Afterall, Nokia is trying to make money with its own music store. Glover said it will be a “good, better, best” scenario, where a number of services may be integrated, but Nokia will be a seamless experience.

-- Browser vs. Client: Today, most rich experiences happen through an application on the phone, but soon the browser will be smart to handle some of the same functionalities. Glover: “Today, you have to have the application because you can’t hook the camera to the browser.” Nokia is working on bringing together these two worlds, “so you don’t have to have dual experiences.” Does that mean clients will go completely away? “In some cases, they will. .. . “With Ajax on the Web, there’s so much functionality—you can drag and drop and do more all the time. The same thing will happen on the device. This is a mobile computer—Nokia calls them multimedia devices. This is an area we are working on.”